A depressing and often cloying memoir that may hold some appeal for readers in similar circumstances with a penchant for...
A debut memoir focused on divorce and death.
Beginning with her own youth, essayist McColl, the founding editor-in-chief of Yahoo Food, notes that her mother was her “spiritual home,” and she venerates her mother on almost every page of the book. Looking back, the author recalls her mother as a colorful mixture of wisdom and sensuality whose role as a mother was perhaps the ultimate aspect of her personality. Her parents’ divorce shattered McColl’s world for a time, leaving her even more invested in her mother as her basis for stability. The author eventually married, beginning a long road to divorce. McColl’s descriptions of her ex-husband do not immediately elicit sympathy; the couple simply drifted apart, the husband toward his career, the wife toward her dying mother. “I loved my husband,” she writes, “and then I didn’t. Is that a story?” Throughout the book, the author sets her narration against the backdrop of her mother’s illness, an era that clearly affected nearly everything else in her life. Her mother’s eventual death left McColl with “a roiling grief” so great and traumatic that she even decided against her therapist’s suggestion of a grief counseling group: “Someone else might know loss, but no one could understand mine.” Though poignant in spots, the book is nearly devoid of hope or significant life lessons; it is ultimately a study in sadness and seemingly relentless unhappiness brought on by chronic grief and relational ennui. As a writer, McColl is introspective and attempts to be inventive, but much of the prose demonstrates an author trying too hard: “The sound of fireworks in the distance. Here, fireflies. I wanted to tie myself up in his arms and he wanted to be the rope.”
A depressing and often cloying memoir that may hold some appeal for readers in similar circumstances with a penchant for dwelling on heartache.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-470-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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